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. 2023 Jan 26;7(3):414–423. doi: 10.1038/s41559-022-01975-w

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© The Author(s) 2023

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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Fig. 2 — When an ancestral population reaches a novel environment, an immediate PC moves the trait from an initial value of L_o in the old environment to L_p in the new environment. As populations adapt over time, a further EC shifts L_p to a new value of L_a. a, The evolutionary response to ancestral plasticity can be divided into three categories depending on the values of PC and EC. b–e, Cartoon representations of scenarios. Dashed line represents transition from ancestral to novel environment and associated trait shift, PC. b, Reinforcement occurs when the subsequent EC is in the same direction as PC. c, Overshooting occurs when PC has moved the trait value closer to the new optimum (that is, L_a is closer to L_p than L_o). In this scenario, EC is in the opposite direction to PC, but |EC| < 0.5 × |PC|. d,e, Reversion occurs when the optimum in the new habitat is nearer to the value of the unstressed ancestor in its home environment than the ancestor’s response (that is, L_a is closer to L_o than L_p), so EC is in the opposite direction to PC, but |EC| < 0.5 × |PC|. Reversion can include the restoration of the ancestral state in the old environment (|EC| = |PC|) (e) or move beyond this value in the opposite direction (|EC| >|PC|) (d). Reinforcement and overshooting suggest that ancestral plasticity was adaptive, whereas reversion indicates it was maladaptive.